Grammatical Transitivity and Indirect Speech Combination in Action: Voices from Characters in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)

Innocent Sourou Koutchadé

doi:10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.11.10

Abstract

In mass communication, the material process use makes it easy to lay emphasis on the participants’ actions, events, and circumstances of their occurrence, while mental process contributes to insisting on their psychological and emotional states. As for indirect speech, it characterizes the version always used by messengers, public announcers, journalists, and reporters. This study aims to analyze Transitivity and Indirect Speech in clauses ingrained and identified in some passages taken from Helon Habila’s Oil On Water (2011). One of the major principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics is that the exploration of the Transitivity properties (processes, participants, and circumstances) in a text leads to draw conclusions about the question -“who does what to whom, under what circumstances?”? In order to deliver the set objectives, the ongoing study specifically draws on the principles of experiential meaning to get data from the selected extracts and, focuses on describing the clauses containing reported speeches. By following the mixed research methods guiding principles, this research work has generated some data which enable to come up with a conclusion on the psychological and psychosomatic states of the participants as well as on the assigned status adopted by some characters. That correlates them to reporters and journalists. This research work has enabled me to develop another. This paper has made it easy to have another view about Helon Habila’s messages and the way they are conveyed throughout his novel.

Highlights

Grammatical Transitivity and Indirect Speech Combination in Action: Voices from Characters in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)
One of the major principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics is that the exploration of the Transitivity properties in a text leads to draw conclusions about the question -“who does what to whom, under what circumstances?”? In order to deliver the set objectives, the ongoing study draws on the principles of experiential meaning to get data from the selected extracts and, focuses on describing the clauses containing reported speeches
The overall and specific objective formulated in this regard considers a correlation of the interplay between the direct and indirect transitive process as well as the indirect speeches for an insightful alignment and categorization of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)

Summary

Introduction

Grammatical Transitivity and Indirect Speech Combination in Action: Voices from Characters in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011). Halliday (2004) contends that Functional Linguistics is characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker’s and hearer’s side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Halliday (1985) has identified in his approach three metafunctions that are: ideational (how we represent reality in language), interpersonal (the grammatical choices that enable speakers to enact their complex and diverse interpersonal relations) and textual (who is about the organization of the conveyed message). In order to fully understand this relationship, it is paramount to be aware of the role communication plays in the exchange of both verbal and nonverbal messages between at least two people At this stage, three research questions come to mind: i)

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion